A couple months ago I had a chance to shoot a small assignment for Uponor – a Finland-based manufacturer of residential and commercial HVAC components whose US headquarters is in Eagan, MN. Uponor’s in-house magazine caters to a global workforce, and the piece I photographed addressed the issues surrounding moving halfway around the world to take a position in another country. That’s my shot on the right: Ulf is an engineer from Sweden who has been living in the Twin Cities for the past couple years.

The hallway where we did the portrait fit the direction I had been given really well, I thought: clean & simple, good for the laying over of text. When I scouted it I envisioned a nice natural light shot, using the row of windows running the length of the hall. Of course it was raining buckets the day my assistant TJ and I went out for the shoot, but we found a very fortuitous overhang outside one of the windows that was the perfect size for a big strobe with softbox. So we moved along Plan B: bring the sun with you! And make sure you’ve got it well-wrapped in tall kitchen garbage bags, with a couple sandbags weighing down the light stand. While we futzed with lighting, Ulf kept us entertained with tales of cross-country RV trips exploring America with his extended Swedish family. (Turns out car problems in the Dakotas aren’t much fun, but make for good stories when you get home.)

Thanks loads to Sanoma Magazines Finland for the assignment! Hopefully we’ll get another chance to work together in 2010.

I have this tendency to hang out with people who like to push the envelope when it comes to food. The kind of people who order three pizzas when in reality we only need one, just for the variety. Who order one – of each – whatever the choices may be.

People like my friend Kelly, who cackle maniacally about something like. . . the Bacon Explosion.

Never heard of the Bacon Explosion? It might be best for your health that way, but now that you’re here I’ve gotta tell you about it. First you take yourself some bacon and you weave yourself a mat. (How’s that for a start?) Next, you take some pork sausage and layer it on top of the bacon mat. Then comes another layer of cured pork – could be fried bacon, could be pancetta, whatever you got. Throw in some barbecue rub spices, a pepper or two, then roll it all up and throw it on the smoker.

The Bacon Explosion is one of those things that you know you shouldn’t do, but you can’t help yourself; you know you should turn away, but you just have to look. It is, after all, made first and foremost of the tastiest food on the planet. It’s basically pig crack.

As I learned, the Bacon Explosion makes you do some nutty things. When I first asked Kelly if he’d be up for a day of bacon and photography, he got really excited, and proceeded to spend the couple weeks until the shoot day honing his menu and refining what would go in to our explosion. When the time came, the menu for Kelly and his wife Liz, my wife Johanna, and me, included:

• Brown sugar bacon-wrapped jalapeno poppers, filled with cream cheese, coconut milk, and pineapple
• One rack of ribs
• One beer butter sauce infused whole chicken
• Twice baked potatoes (topped with bacon. . . duh)
• One bacon explosion

Everyone was more than a little incredulous about the ribs and chicken on top of the main event, but as Kelly said, “I thought the Bacon Explosion was gonna look so small all alone on the smoker.” The last thing you want to do is give the Bacon an inferiority complex.

before

after

Huge thanks to Kelly and Liz for their willingness to take Johanna and me on an epic food adventure. Kelly’s prowess on the grill and in the kitchen is perfectly matched by Liz’s good-natured response to seeing Kelly unload 10 pounds of meat for dinner. The bacon hangover I suffered the next day did nothing to take away from the deliciousness, or the experience of pushing my personal bacon boundaries.

This expression says it all.

The finished goodness

Update: in the giving-credit-where-credit-is-due department, check out the BBQ Addicts site for a look at the original madness.

Following up on my shoot at the Twin Cities Bridge Center last month, last week I had the chance to hang out with the Minneapolis Grand Slam Club in the friendly confines of the Richfield Community Center. While at the Twin Cities Bridge Center I had been told that if I wanted to understand the Minnesota bridge culture I should really talk to Peggy Kaplan – a long-time competitor and winner on the national bridge stage, and in the words of her husband, an ambassador for the game of bridge. Peggy was nice enough to invite me to photograph the Grand Slam club, which draws some of the more advanced players in town to their Friday night games.

There’s clearly a high degree of focus, concentration, and seriousness to these games. But across the board, the people I talked to wanted me to understand that bridge isn’t just cold calculation and steely glares. In fact, the club has a zero tolerance policy against meanness. How many clubs can say that?

And bridge players consider themselves a family: a couple years ago, one of the Grand Slam organizers had a stroke. He didn’t have health insurance, and the club came together and raised over $6,000 for his treatment. Another member told me how great it is that wherever you go as a bridge player, you can call up the local club and have a social group to connect with. He listed off the places where he still has contact with the local clubs: Des Moines, Omaha, Fort Lauderdale. . .

Thanks to Peggy and the Grand Slam club for allowing me in to your game. And thanks to all of you for stopping by and keeping up with my photo adventures! May we all take a cue from the Grand Slammers this holiday season and adopt a zero tolerance for meanness policy, balance science and art, and look out for our fellow competitors.

All the best to you this Holiday Season!

National champ Peggy Kaplan

It’s been a little while since I’ve posted on the status of The Big Project – not because there’s been no progress, of course. I’ve just been a bad blog friend. Sorry about that.

But here I am now to give you some of the scoop! First of all, branding. Maybe you caught my announcement of the new wedding portfolio site, where you can see the wedding version of my new logo in action. If not, let’s put a spotlight on the logo, because I for one have a hard time getting enough of it.

Man, I am so. . . stoked. . . about the job Andrew Voss has done so far on design. (And by the way, I never use the word stoked.) He hit it out of the park, as far as I’m concerned. It’s modern but authentic, sophisticated yet hand-hewn. I love it, and I feel like it speaks to my photographic style perfectly. Big props to Mr. Voss for the logo and the layouts he’s come up with for my print portfolio, postcards, letterhead, business cards. . . the whole works. I can’t wait to unleash the green side on the world in the coming weeks.

The wedding site was accompanied by a new print portfolio book, housed in a spectacular hand made slip cover and cover made by the immensely talented Scott Mullenberg. If you’re in the market for a custom book maker, you couldn’t do better than Scott. His product is absolutely top notch, he’s creative, responsive, and professional. I’ll be using him for my non-wedding portfolios, and for all high end wedding albums I produce.

Once the wedding site and book were wrapped up, I moved on to marketing my wedding business. Compared to last year in particular, the rate of bookings for 2010 has been gangbusters so far, and I think a lot of the credit for that should go to Andrew’s beautiful design and Selina Maytreya’s editing and sequencing of the images used. I’ve had nothing but fun working with these guys, and I feel like I’m projecting a much more true idea of my capabilities to the world, which feels great.

In other wedding news, I will be the preferred photographer for events at Solera Restaurant in downtown Minneapolis, which is particularly exciting because I have so much respect for the food they put out. I photographed a wedding there last June and had a great time using their bright colors and wide windows and views of Minneapolis as my backdrop. Hopefully I’ll be there lots more in the months to come.

Most recently, this week Selina and I have been at work editing my non-wedding work. They’re still in a bit of flux, but here are the sequences for the three galleries I’ll be relaunching my site and print portfolio with as they stand today.

Portraits

Foodies

Sun City

Having this new edit is super energizing; working on your own portfolio by yourself, it’s easy to get bogged down in your attachment to certain images and your own individual artistic sensibility. Working with another person you trust – especially someone like Selina, who has a ton of experience in the industry – clarifies the work you do, and how it holds together as a whole. I really like the way these images flow one to the next to lead a viewer through some of the best of what I’ve photographed so far. It’ll be fun to package it all up and throw it to the winds in 2010.